Read Heart of Palm for Free Online Page A

only other prohibition-era industry that made a lick of sense in a thickly wooded Florida hideaway on the banks of a marine highway with a straight shot to the thirsty coastal towns of Georgia, South Carolina, and beyond.
    Moonshine made money—real money—but it was a short-lived success for Utina. Just when Alger and his cronies had gotten the complexities of production and distribution as close to fine-tuned as they were likely to get, Uncle Sam repealed prohibition and the pendulum of supply and demand swung wildly out of Utina’s grasp and back into the waiting clutches of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Anheuser-Busch, whose industrialists had been sitting on their asses and making ice cream and barley syrup for the past thirteen years. By Christmas 1933, Alger Bravo had married, fathered three children, burned down his stills, and drunk himself spectacularly into an early grave. Bereft of a captain, Utina had once again thrown up its hands, heaved a collective sigh, and settled into a posture of civic and economic lassitude that became, over the years, a communal chip on the shoulder of the surviving Bravos and indeed the entire town. The main line of reasoning, Frank had gathered, was that prosperity was a train that simply hadn’t bothered to stop here, and there wasn’t any use chasing a train on foot. So fuck it.
    But even the unprosperous had to eat, shop, pray, and drink somewhere. Alger’s children grew and settled, and the poor whites and blacks who’d been drawn to Utina for the moonshine stuck around for the fishing and the newly reopened bars and package stores, so the business district of Utina had grown lazily, stubbornly through the years. Eventually downtown Utina consisted of some two dozen small storefronts and businesses along the three-block stretch of Seminary Street. Sterling’s Drugstore to the east, which faced the stoic white clapboards of the First Baptist Church on the other side of the street, shared a crumbling roofline with People’s Guarantee Bank before giving way to a rambling string of businesses that culminated at a Lil’ Champ convenience store, just adjacent to the boat ramp.
    It was a town, Frank thought now, as he idled at the stoplight at Seminary and Cooksey, that time had largely forgotten, though he had to admit there’d been some changes in the last five years. New paving and a wider shoulder on County Road 25, which connected Utina to the beach seven miles to the east. A Walgreens springing up just a few blocks from Utina High. More than a few Prudential Realty signs stuck in the yards of homes in South Utina, and a convoy of Hondas and Nissans making their way down from Jacksonville and up from St. Augustine on weekends to troll the streets, expensively casual couples wielding cups of Starbucks coffee, peering out car windows and calculating property taxes, homestead exemptions, and the distance to the ocean. And this —he squinted through the windshield this morning and across the intersection, where the whole southeast corner of Seminary and Cooksey had been clear-cut to make room for a fancy new Publix supermarket. Already the frame was in place, already a three-acre parking lot was staked.
    Publix in Utina. It was hard to believe, though it did make some sense, he admitted. All of Utina, including Frank’s own wooded lot, was within a ten-minute drive to the Atlantic. And much of Utina, including his mother Arla’s house and Uncle Henry’s, the adjacent family restaurant he managed, fronted the steep shady banks and clear deep-water channel of the Intracoastal. There were moments when it appeared that the village might actually hold some appeal to buyers looking for dwindling slices of Florida real estate. There were even moments when it appeared to Frank that, for once, something owned by the Bravo family might hold some merit, monetary or otherwise. But who knew? History painted a different picture. Part of him could envision the Publix in five years,